Mankind has apparently entered a mass extinction – sorry

According to a new study by top scientists at Stanford University, the human race is entering a mass extinction which will eventually eradicate it. Crikey.

Turns out we’re not meeting our maker via asteroids - there’s frankly nothing Bruce Willis, a space-bound team of drillers and a pumping Aerosmith ballad can do to save us this time around, sadly - as mankind’s biggest threat is actually overpopulation, which is destroying natural habitats, species of animals and plants, and eventually all of us.

And if that weren’t frightening enough, just listen to chief doom-monger Professor Paul Ehrlich, the senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment in California who led the study: "[The findings] show without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event."

The thoughts and findings are echoed by another recent study, published in the journal Science Advances, that showed that even with extremely conservative estimation, species are disappearing up to 100 times faster than the normal rate between mass extinctions – levels not seen since the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago.

Gerardo Ceballos, of the Universidad Autónoma de México behind that study, also had some bad news for anyone looking forward to seeing MK Dons winning the Champions League in a few decades: "If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on."

His team of researchers compared a highly conservative estimate of current extinctions with an estimated ‘background rate’ of losses twice as high as those widely used in earlier analyses, concluding that mankind now faces "a global spasm of biodiversity loss".

So what is to be done to halt this impending disaster? Quite a lot, starting with efforts in conserving species and habitats, something Prof Ehrlich and his team are currently urging governments to do more on.

Or we just ask Richard Branson to speed up his plans for a Virgin Moon Colony.